The Great Deception

the first 9/11 documentary, still one of the best

Barrie Zwicker's 2002 film "The Great Deception" is an
excellent introduction to the issues of 9/11, the "failure"
of the Air Force to intercept the hijacked planes, and George W. Bush's
apparent disinterest when told that the towers had been attacked (he stayed
in a second grade classroom reading with students for another half hour
instead of acting as Commander-in-Chief). The video footage of Bush reading
"The Pet Goat" was in this film two and a half years before
Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11.

Balance of INTRODUCTORY REMARKS
By Barrie Zwicker, Herbst Theatre,
SAN FRANCISCO 21 APRIL 2003
at premier showing of Guerrilla News Network's film "Aftermath"

I think it could help the panelists, and myself, to orient our remarks
better, if you'd respond to four questions. Your responses will shed
light on, collectively "where we're at," in this room tonight,
on 9/11.
First question (and on all questions, take your time, answer honestly).
Hands up, when you're ready, how many here are pretty sure that elements
of the U.S. government not just knew, but actively participated in the
hijackings of 9/11, were, in a word, complicit?
(Observers and myself think about 80% of audience put hands up.)
Second question, hands up when you're ready, how many here believe that
by and large the official 9/11 narrative is valid - namely that one
evil man and a small group of co-conspirators carried it off, catching
the intelligence, the military, the airlines, everybody, essentially
off guard?
(I recall only a scattering of hands go up.)
Third question, how many believe, to condense the situation into two
words: "Bush knew."
(Again, many hands went up, probably more than 50%, but I realized later
that this question overlapped question #1.)
Final question, how many haven't raised your hands yet?
(A few hands went up.)
Thank you.
Now I am not one of your neutral moderators. To begin with maybe I should
be called your immoderator. Although after my opening remarks here,
I will magically metamorphose into a semi-shrinking violet to fulfill
the rest of my moderatorly duties in the usual fair and impartial way.
But out of the gate here - I believe the official narrative about 9/11
is a Big Lie, with a capital B and a capital L.My offering is that 9/11 was what the anarchist Bakunin called
"the propaganda of the act." That it was "Reichstag Fire
2001." That it was the greatest deception of its kind ever foisted.
And that's saying something, in light of the long and totally-neglected
history of this kind of war-triggering deception perpetrated by powerful
special interests to sway public opinion in favour of deadly agendas
that almost always result in serious grief for just about everyone.
My offering is that 9/11 was arranged to jump start the so-called war
on terrorism, which in turn is the cover and heat exchanger for hot
wars, these being the toxic tip of the machinery for world domination.
At the levers is a clique of neocons that has hijacked this country's
foreign policy at the behest largely and to the benefit mainly of Big
Arms and Big Oil, with the rest of the worst at the top, giving the
thumbs-up and boarding the gravy train. Judging by your response to the questions I posed, the focus
tonight within the general subject 9/11, may tend to be:
Not whether the take on 9/11 is along the lines I've expressed, but
on the who's and the how's and the what-to-do's.
I hope we'll find time to address visions of a better future, one much
freer of vast dark tax-funded bureaucracies of deceit, deception, assassination
and destabilization of civil societies abroad -- and at home, in your
country, and in mine.
A prerequisite for opening up a wider path to that better future is
that a larger percentage of the hypnotized public than at present have
its patriotic trance broken and be willing to question the provenance
of 9/11 and its iconic power.
The hypocritical verbiage and bald false assertions of George Bush and
his dark cabal of reactionary revolutionaries and oiligarchs who "mix
greed, inept economic management, business corruption, crony capitalism,
triumphalist Pentagon sable-rattling and Axis of Evil foreign policy
theology," have been deconstructed by most people around the world.
(By the way, I don't want to be accused of plagiarization. Most of what
I just said is a direct quote from Kevin Phillips, a leading Republican
theoretician.)
Money power, firepower and propaganda power are all spilling out of
the closet.
What's still mainly hidden in the closet, is the power of deception
and the extent of deception. And the single deception which, if exposed
in a politically-relevant way, would have the most impact, is the most
brazen deception of all, 9/11. That's why this meeting and others like
it are crucial.

When you’re watching a news report, have you ever had the
feeling that something’s fishy? That the event is not as it appears,
and not as reported? I get that feeling fairly often. Sometimes I’m
just being paranoid. Hey, nobody’s perfect. But other times that
skeptical light bulb goes off for a good reason. ...

For four months I’ve been waiting in vain for the North American
media to pursue questions about the startling events of September 11th.
Here’s what I want to know:
The multiple hijackings are unprecedented. The first occurs at 7:45
in the morning. It’s a full hour before the first plane hits the
World Trade Center. But it’s an hour and 20 minutes -- and after
the second plane hits – that the President allegedly becomes informed.
Think about that.
Then, he gives no orders. Why? He continues to listen to a student talk
about her pet goat. Why?
It’s another 25 minutes until he makes a statement, even as flight
77 is making a bee-line for Washington, DC.
In the almost two hours of the total drama not a single U.S. Air Force
interceptor turns a wheel until it’s too late. Why? Was it total
incompetence on the part of aircrews trained and equipped to scramble
in minutes?
Well, unlike the U.S. Air Force, I’ll cut to the chase. Simply
to ask these few questions is to find the official narrative frankly
implausible. The more questions you pursue, it becomes more plausible
that there’s a different explanation: namely, that elements within
the top U.S. military, intelligence and political leadership –
which are closely intertwined – are complicit in what happened
on September the 11th.
Why U.S. complicity, you ask?
Well, to stampede public opinion into supporting the so-called war on
terrorism, to justify a war on Afghanistan for a future oil pipeline,
the grab for Middle East oil, big budget increases for the military,
and the general drive for global domination by the American Empire.
I know it sounds incredible.
But here’s some historical context from this book, Body of Secrets.
Its author is James Bamford. Bamford until recently was Washington Investigative
Producer for ABC’s World News tonight with Peter Jennings. I learned
of this book on ABC’s website.
Bamford’s information comes from interviews with, for instance,
the former dean of the U.S. intelligence community and from government
documents. It takes 80 pages to list Bamford’s more than 600 information
sources.
Here’s the story. It’s 1962. John F. Kennedy is U.S. president.
Robert McNamara is Secretary of Defence. And Admiral Lyman Lemnitzer
heads the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff. The CIA has failed in its illegal
Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba.
JFK decides, Bamford writes, to back away from military solutions to
the Cuban problem.
But Lemnitzer, the CIA and others at the top remain obsessed with Cuba.
Writes Bamford: “As the Kennedy brothers appeared to suddenly
‘go soft’ on Cuba, Lemnitzer could see his opportunity to
invade … quickly slipping away. …attempts to provoke the
Cuban public to revolt seemed dead…”
Continues Bamford: “Lemnitzer and the other chiefs knew there
was only one option left that would ensure their war. They would have
to trick the American public and world opinion…”
Lemnitzer comes up with Operation Northwoods.
“We could blow up a U.S. ship in Guantanamo Bay and blame Cuba…casualty
lists in U.S. newspapers would cause a helpful wave of national indignation.”
“We could develop a Communist Cuban terror campaign in the Miami
area, in other Florida cities and even in Washington.”
An elaborate variation: create “an exact duplicate for a civil
registered aircraft…” “At a designated time the duplicate
would be…loaded with…selected passengers, all boarded under
carefully prepared aliases. The actual registered aircraft would be
converted to a drone [a remotely controlled unmanned aircraft]”…
“the destruction of (that) aircraft will be triggered by radio
signal.”
The Cubans would be blamed.
Finally, another variation is described by Bamford: “On February
20th, 1962 (John) Glenn was to lift off from Cape Canaveral…on
his historic journey. Lemnitzer “proposed … that should
the rocket explode and kill Glenn, ‘the objective is to provide
irrevocable proof that…the fault lies with (Cuba)…”
“by manufacturing various pieces of evidence which would prove
electronic interference on the part of the Cubans.”
Thus, Bamford notes, “as NASA prepared to send the first American
into space, the Joint Chiefs of Staff were preparing to use John Glenn’s
possible death as a pretext to launch a war.”
The Operation Northwoods plan shows the Pentagon was capable, according
to Bamford, “of launching a secret and bloody war of terrorism
against their own country in order to trick the American public into
supporting a (war on Cuba).”
Can we be sure, therefore, that complicity by the Pentagon in the events
of Sept. 11th is entirely out of the question?
Next week, a more precise look at the events of that fateful day.
And what about bin Laden? I’ll have more on him too. And the arrests
of people named as terrorists around the world.

Sources

WEBSITES

USATODAY.com (for animated map of the routes of the four hijacked
airliners). This has been taken off the USA TODAY website.

Body of Secrets, Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency,From
the Cold War Through the Dawn of a New Century, by James Bamford (author
of The Puzzle Palace), hard cover, Doubleday, New York, 2001, 721 pages,
ISBN 0-385-49907-8

Next, more troubling questions. Part 2 in my series of commentaries
about the events of September 11th.
As you’ve heard in the panel discussion, a common explanation
as to why no U.S. military interceptors took to the skies on September
11th until it was too late, is that it was “simple incompetence.”
Well, let me deal with the “incompetence theory” by first
taking you back to October 26th, 1999. That is the day the chartered
Learjet carrying golfer Payne Stewart crashes, killing all on board.
This from the official National Transportation Safety Board crash report:
9:19 a.m.: the flight departs
9:24: The Learjet’s pilot responds to an instruction from air
traffic control
9:33: The controller radios another instruction. No response from the
pilot. For 4 1⁄2 minutes the controller tries to establish contact.
9:38: Having failed, the controller calls in the military. Note that
he did not seek, nor did he require, the approval of the President of
the United States, or indeed anyone. It’s standard procedure,
followed routinely, to call in the Air Force when radio contact with
a commercial passenger jet is lost, or the plane departs from its flight
path, or anything along those lines occurs.
9:54 – 16 minutes later -- the F-16 reaches the Learjet at 46,000
feet and conducts a visual inspection.
Total elapsed time: 21 minutes.
So what does this prove? Well, it proves that standing routines exist
for dealing with all such emergencies, for instance loss of radio contact.
All personnel in the air and on the ground are trained to follow the
routines, which have been fine-tuned over decades, as the Learjet incident
illustrates.
For large scheduled aircraft, tracked throughout on radar, to depart
extravagantly from their flight paths, would trigger numerous calls
to the military, especially after two have hit the World Trade Centre
and now one is speeding toward Washington, D.C.
It flies over the White House, turns sharply and heads toward the Pentagon.
Everyone – and I mean everyone – now knows these planes
are very bad news. It’s been reported on all TV networks for more
than half an hour that this is a terrorist attack.
Now, Andrews Air Force Base is a huge installation. It’s home
to Air Force One, the President’s plane. It’s home base
for two combat-ready squadrons of jet interceptors mandated to ensure
the safety of the U.S. capital. Andrews is only 12 miles from the White
House.
On September 11th the squadrons there were:
The 121st Fighter Squadron of the 113th Fighter Wing, equipped with
F-16s
The 321st Marine Fighter Attack Squadron of the 49th Marine Air Group,
Detachment A, equipped F/A-18s
This information was on the website of the base on September 11th. [POSSIBLE
(cuts)] On September 12th, Andrews chose to update its website. I find
it odd that after the update there’s no mention of the F-16 and
F-18 fighters. The base becomes, according to the website, home to a
transport squadron only.
Yet at 6:30 the evening of September 11th NBC Nightly News, along with
many outlets, reported:
"It was after the attack on the Pentagon that the Air Force then
decided to scramble F-16s out of the DC National Guard Andrews Air Force
Base to fly … a protective cover over Washington, D.C."
Throughout the northeastern United States are many air bases. But that
morning no interceptors respond in a timely fashion to the highest alert
situation. This includes the Andrews squadrons which have the longest
lead time and are 12 miles from the White house.
Whatever the explanation for the huge failure, there have been no reports,
to my knowledge, of reprimands. This further weakens the “Incompetence
Theory.” Incompetence usually earns reprimands.
This causes me to ask – and other media need to ask – if
there were “stand down” orders.
Next week, bin Laden was a longtime close ally of the CIA, according
to the CIA itself. Why did he suddenly turn against them? Or did he?

"The Great Deception"
Part 3 of a multi-part series 3
Transcript of Mon.,Feb 4, 2002 Broadcast

What really happened on Sept. 11th? "9/11
-- Part 3"

Osama bin Laden is not an easy subject. Characterizations of him vary
wildly. The most common, because it’s the official narrative of
cardboard cutout simplicity, is that he’s the world’s number
one villain, the diabolical mastermind behind the events of September
11th. Another view: Osama is “… the conscience of Islam.”
Well, globally, Osama is like a Rorschach ink blot. His character and
role morph into what various publics project upon him, based on what
they’re led to believe.
Take books. There’s an adage “You can’t tell a book
by its cover” Maybe so, but you can tell it by its index. “Bin
Laden, the Man Who Declared War on America” is by Yossef Bodansky,
former senior consultant to the Pentagon and U.S. state department.
“Bodansky explains (a) vast global conspiracy…” it
says in the foreword.
The index entries on bin Laden in this 440-page book run almost two
pages. But there are just four references to the CIA, mostly brief and
reveal nothing. Yet the decades-long eight-billion-dollar CIA covert
operation in Afghanistan was also its largest ever, according to numerous
sources, including journalist John Cooley in his book Unholy Wars: Afghanistan,
America and International Terrorism.
Contrast the Bodansky book with this one, “Taliban,” by
Ahmed Rashid. He’s a Pakistani journalist who’s covered
Afghanistan for 21 years. In his index are eight entries about bin Laden
and 11 about the CIA.
Now, back to bin Laden. What do most sources agree on? We know bin Laden
is born in Saudi Arabia in 1957. Okay we’re not sure about the
year. His father becomes a close friend of the king, and “fabulously
wealthy.” Bin Laden Corporation becomes one of the largest construction
companies in the Middle East.
In this business you’re dealing with the Pakistani intelligence—the
ISI, Saudi intelligence, the CIA. With his family’s blessing Osama
becomes closely associated with the CIA in the Afghan war against the
Soviets. Bin Laden Corp built major training camps for the CIA. “In
1986 he helped build the Khost tunnel complex, which the CIA was funding
as a major arms stoage depot, training facility and medical centre for
the mujaheddin…” At this point bin Laden’s story,
like Stephen Leacock’s horse, “rides madly off in all directions.”
My questions: Did he turn against the CIA? Maintain ties while making
anti-American statements? Was he manipulated? “Former associates
describe him as deeply impressionable, always in need of mentors,”
Rashid writes.
You’re forced to turn to a larger canvas. As in the final draft
of this to-be-published book “The War on Freedom, Causes and Consequences
of 9-11” by Nafeez Ahmed, executive director of the Institute
for Policy Research & Development in Brighton, England. He’s
an Oxfam campaigner who specializes in writing international reports
on human rights. News of his reports have been carried by Reuters, Associated
Press, The Guardian, The Independent, the Jewish Chronicle and the London
Jewish News.
Ahmed writes that bin Laden is merely a piece in a chess game. The stakes
of the game are the last of the world’s oil reserves and “…the
Bush administration’s “(consolidation of power) to pursue
a drastic unlimited militarization of foreign policy on a massive and
unprecedented scale required by long-standing elite planning, while
crushing domestic dissent and criminalizing legitimate protest.”
I believe that if we shrink from testing Ahmed’s overview and
accept only the headlines of the day we will fail to see the forest
for the trees.
The USA helped recruit, train and equip thousands of killer mujahideen
in the anti-Soviet war. Ahmed’s book and other evidence shows
the recruiting and training terrorists, including those in al-Qaeda,
has continued for years. The White House “went underground”
with this aid.
This is detailed in the 1993 book “The Outlaw Bank, A Wild Ride
Into the Secret Heart of BCCI.” BCCI stands for Bank of Credit
and Commerce International. It collapsed after exposure of its massive
fraud and corruption. The book’s authors are Jonathan Beaty and
S. C. Gwynne. Beaty was an investigative reporter and senior correspondent
for Time magazine; Gwynne Time’s economics editor and author of
“Selling Money.”
The book reveals the BCCI’s connections with the CIA and “a
Washington coverup that …protected the BCCI….” The
BCCI’s ‘Black Network’ operating in Afghanistan and
other countries dealt in “drug deals and terrorism.” The
authors describe what they found as “a disturbing criminal conspiracy.”
Further evidence of the long and deep involvement of the CIA in terrorism
is found in the 1987 book The Crimes of Patriots, A True Tale of Dope,
Dirty Money, and the CIA, by Jonathan Kwitny. Kwitny at the time had
been a Wall Street Journal reporter for 16 years.
He wrote that neither the director of the CIA nor the deputy director
“had, in his career, shown any reluctance to shed American or
foreign blood in covert military operations as a means to carrying out
their assignments.” The book details “how some of the biggest
names in American defense and intelligence were involved in an operation
that promoted the dope trade, tax evasion, and gun running…”
Michael Springmann is a Washington lawyer. He worked for the US State
Department’s foreign service for 20 years. He spent two years
as chief of the visa section at the U.S. Consulate in Jeddah, Saudi
Arabia. His superiors repeatedly ordered him to issue visas to unqualified
applicants. It was illegal. He protested.
He’s just written this article in the reputable Covert Action
Quarterly of Washington, D.C. and was interviewed by the CBC radio program
Dispatches. “I had not been protesting fraud. What I was protesting
was, in reality, an effort to bring recruits, rounded up by [the Agency
and] Osama bin Laden, to the U.S. for terrorist training by the CIA.”
He details numerous cases.
“The State Department did not run the Consulate in Jeddah. The
CIA did. Of the roughly 20 Washington-dispatched staff there, I know
for a certainty that only three people (including myself) had no ties,
either professional or familial, to any of the U.S. intelligence services.”
What bugs me to no end is that mainstream media journalists operate
as if these books – written by the most professional of their
ranks – they operate as if these books don’t exist! Fellow
journalists, the dots exist. For goodness’ sake, connect them,
while you can.
There are plenty of what we call in the news biz “pegs.”
Solid current evidence. New dots. But these dots, past and present,
are never connected. Take this November 22nd front page story in The
Globe and Mail. I almost missed the startling information in this myself
because the headline indulges a stereotypical Canadian self-putdown:
us stupid Canadians, we let a terrorist -- one Ali Mohamed -- get away.
The real story is buried. “Mr. Mohamed … was a U.S. Army
sergeant…but trained bin Laden’s bodyguards.”
What?
“Ali Mohamed was in the Americans’ good books…”
“…Ali Mohamed wasn’t so shadowy in those days. He
was one of their guys.”
A terrorist one of the FBI’s “guys?”
The headline on this story might have read: “FBI Protected Top
al-Qaeda Operative.” And it might well have been the banner.
Ahmed’s own conclusion is that “the documentation…
strongly suggests the United States, or more precisely significant elements
of the U.S. government, military and intelligence, had extensive foreknowledge
of the 11th September attacks, and were in various ways complicit in
those attacks.”
All this and more must be considered when asking “What really
happened on Sept. 11th?”
And bin Laden? Journalist and former Los Angeles Police Department detective
Michael Ruppert quipped recently: “One guess is that he’s
in Switzerland having his nails done.”
Next week, George W. Bush and the Oiligarchy.

Sources

BOOKS

Ahmed, Nafeez Mossaddeq: “The War on Freedom, Causes and Consequences
of 9-11 (draft version),” to be published, 220 pages.
The most complete book I know of, at this time, summarizing the relevant
background and foreground intersecting upon the events of September
11, 2001.

Bodansky, Yossef: “Bin Laden, The Man Who Declared War on America,”
Forum, 1999, 439 pps, soft cover, ISBN 0-7615-3581-0.
This book is pure propaganda in the worst sense, an example of sophisticated
disinformation. It’s designed to fool people into thinking they’re
getting the lowdown from an insider. A check of the index’s startling
omissions give it away. It’s well-known that Osama bin Laden has
been a key CIA “asset.” Any book on bin Laden, therefore,
should explore the CIA-bin Laden connection thoroughly. Yet the CIA
is barely mentioned. Omission is a crucial tool of propaganda.

Cooley, John: “Unholy Wars:Afghanistan, America and International
Terrorism,” Pluto Press, 299 pages, soft cover, ISBN 0 7453 1691
3.
One of the more reliable reporters, from whom Noam Chomsky draws material.
He continues to track developments and his work is worth watching.

Kwitny, Jonathan: “The Crimes of Patriots: A True Tale of Dope,
Dirty Money, and the CIA,” W. W. Norton & Company, 1987, 424
pps, hard cover, ISBN 0-393-02387-7.
Kwitny when he wrote this had been a Wall Street Journal reporter for
16 years, and had received the Honor Medal for Career Achievement by
the University of Missouri School of Journalism. The book is well written,
detailed, persuasive and shocking, one of the books concerned citizens
should consider reading to inform themselves of the deep-rooted lawless
and malignant nature and scope of the CIA, protected by billions of
dollars of taxpayer money, secrecy and political cover under Republican
and Democratic administrations.

Rashid, Ahmed: “Taliban,” Yale University Press, 2001,
279 pp, soft cover, ISBN0-300-08902-3.
Rashid’s long experience in Afghanistan, his credentials as a
journalist, and his attempts to connect the historical and current dots
in his region of the world, make his work reasonably credible.

Beaty, Jonathan, and Gwynne, S. C.: “The Outlaw Bank, a Wild
Ride into the Secret Heart of BCCI,” Random House, New York, 399
pp, hardcover, ISBN 0-679-41384-7.
At the time they wrote this book, Beaty was an investigative reporter
and senior correspondent for Time magazine, and Gwynne was Time’s
economics editor. This book is as exhaustively documented as Kwitny’s,
and uncovers the same kind of widespread deceitful, violent, criminal
activities by the CIA as does Kwitny. It also discovers, as does Kwitny,
that these illegal and violent activities are protected by those at
the top of the corporate, financial and political heirarchy.

www.emperors-clothes.com
Site founder: Jared Israel. I discovered Emperior’s Clothes about
two years ago and have found its facts reliable, its knowledge of history
solid, its analyses prescient. One of the best online journalism sites
imaginable.
URL for the emperors-clothes article on 9/11: http://www.emperors-clothes.com/indict/indict-3.htm

www.copvcia.com
Site founder: Michael Ruppert. I have heard and met Michael Ruppert
and consider him a totally reliable, profound and courageous person.
He’s a former Los Angeles Police Department detective, who saw
with his own eyes CIA agents dealing large amounts of drugs in L.A.
He’s campaigned to expose CIA wrong-doing ever since and this
has led him to a larger, disturbing, picture which we citizens –
anywhere -- must be aware of, to plan a future. His organization is
called From The Wilderness (FTW). That’s also the title of his
publication, available in print and online.
Log in at www.copvcia.com to connect with all subscription and other
information.

[note: copvcia.com became fromthewilderness.com - it was great while it lasted but it is no longer in business]

"The Great Deception"
Part 4 of a multi-part series
Transcript of Mon.,Feb 11, 2002 Broadcast

“What Really Happened on Sept. 11th? "Part
4 (the Oiligarchy)"

Even among those who believe that the war on Afghanistan was part
of the so-called war on terrorism, there’s a fairly wide recognition
that the outcome – the occupation of Afghanistan -- might have
something to do with the ambitions of U.S. oil corporations.
Which brings us to the connection between September 11th and the Oiligarchy.
Let me start with a crash course in globe-oil reality. A framework little
mentioned by the mainstream media.
First, the size and power of Big Oil. “Together, oil and coal
constitute the biggest single industry in history,” writes Ross
Gelbspan in his book, The Heat is On. “Big oil alone does well
over a trillion dollars a year in business.”
Second, we’re at the end of the petroleum era. Total world oil
extraction is peaking. These charts, from Scientific American and other
equally reliable sources, tell the story. And the supply does not drop
off gently. If you think this industry is rich and powerful now, wait ‘til
the supply is clearly on the wane. At the website www.dieoff.com,
you can learn that “in 1995, Petroconsultants published a report
for oil industry insiders ($32,000 per copy) titled WORLD OIL SUPPLY
1930-2050 which concludes that world oil (extraction) could peak as
soon as the year 2000 and decline to half that level by 2025. Large
and permanent increases in oil prices were predicted after the year
2000.”Black gold is going to go platinum.
Hey wait, we’ll just switch to other energy sources, right? Wind,
solar, biomass, tidal. Wrong. “All the alternatives in the world,”
writes former U.S. army officer and political analyst Stan Goff, “cannot
begin to provide more than a tiny fraction of the energy base now provided
by oil. This makes it more than a resource, and the drive to control
what's left more than an economic competition.”
“Most experts agree,” writes Larry Chin in Online Journal,
“that the Caspian Basin and Central Asia are the keys to energy
in the 21st century. …energy expert James Dorian in the Oil &
Gas Journal… “Those who control the oil routes out of Central
Asia will impact all future direction and quantities of flow and the
distribution of revenues from new (extraction).”
In other words a pipeline through, of all places, Afghanistan. Needed
to carry an estimated 5-trillion dollars’ worth of Caspian oil
and gas reserves to markets. A significant detail that surely is not
lost on those in power in the United States. So just who are these people?
Let’s start with the occupant of the Oval Office himself.
George W. Bush was CEO of Harken Energy.
George Herbert Walker Bush, his dad and the former president, was an
oil man. Now he’s on the board of the Carlyle Group, which is
heavily invested in oil and armaments.
Dick Cheney was Secretary of Defense during Desert Storm. He stepped
down to become CEO of Halliburton Oil. Cashed in 34 million dollars
in Halliburton stock options before taking office as vice president.
Donald Evans, Bush’s Commerce Secretary, was with Colorado Oil.
Zalmay Khalilzad is the Bush-appointed special envoy to Afghanistan.
Khalilzad previously was an aide to the American oil company Unocal.
He drew up Unocal’s risk analysis on its proposed trans-Afghan
gas pipeline.
Khalilzad reports to Condoleeza Rice, Bush’s national security
adviser. When she was a board director of Chevron Corporation, she served
as its principal expert on Kazakhstan, where Chevron holds the largest
concession of any of the international oil companies.
Khalilzad will liaise with the new Afghani leader Hamed Karzai. A former
consultant to Unocal.
You get the idea.
A General Motors president once said: “Structure is strategy in
slow motion.” The structure of this cabinet shows, in my opinion,
the primacy of oil interests.
How does this connect with the events of 9/11? Well, it’s hard
to just invade a country out of the blue, I believe. The perfect pretext
is a so-called war on terrorism – founded firmly, so far, upon
the official narrative of what happened on September 11th.The psychological trick at the heart of September 11th, by the
way, is that people confuse their compassion for the victims with their
certainty about who the perpetrators are. The public was presented
with instant perpetrators. The trick will most likely continue working
for all future planned invasions – looks as if Iraq is next –
so long as the public remains blindfolded by the media.
9/11 serves the ends of the Oiligarchy. That does not, in itself, prove
a connection between Big Oil and what happened on September 11th. But
the fact that it does serve those ends must be taken together with other
evidence. Just part of which is the illegal importation, training and
protection of terrorists on U.S. soil by the CIA. The much-publicized
failure of U.S. intelligence. The failure of the U.S. Air Force on the
day. The inexplicable trades of United and American Airlines stocks
in the days prior. The big economic difficulties the Bush administration
was facing. And the looming Enron scandal.

Sources

BOOK

Gelbspan, Ross, “The Heat Is On -- The High Stakes Battle Over
Earth’s threatened Climate,” 278 pages, Addison-Wesley Publishing
Company, Inc., 1997, ISBN 0-201-13295-8 (hard cover). Gelbspan has been
an editor and reporter at The Boston Globe, The Washington Post and
the Philadelphia Inquirer, and is the winner of the Pulitzer Prize.
The book lays out the dangers of global warming and the massive disinformation
campaign by the fossil fuel lobby to obscure the Earth realities that
threaten our existence.

WEBSITES

www.dieoff.com
This is another of the sites founded and run by an individual (in this
case Jay Hanson) informed by a single passionate intelligence. On this
site is a tremendous collection of resources about the Earth’s
fast-diminishing resources and what we can and should do about a fast-approaching
“permanent state of emergency,” to borrow a phrase from
Ross Gelbspan (see “Book.”)

www.narconews.com
Click on Issue #14 (Aug. 25 to Oct. 24), scroll down to “The So-Called
Evidence is a Farce,” for the article and transcript of radio
interview by Goff, Stan. Goff is a veteran of 27 years in the U.S. Army,
most of it in the Special Forces, such as the Delta Force. He served
in eight conflict areas around the world and taught military science
for three semesters at West Point. During the U.S. operation in Haiti
his political consciousness was awakened. He wrote a book about this
titled “Deadly Dream.”
Narconews is a dependable site for well-researched information about
the drug trade and therefore about the banking system’s involvement
in money laundering, and corruption in politics, and the relationship
of media to the subject of the drug trade. Narconews recently (see top
of home page) won an historic court case in the Supreme Court of New
York State against a large bank, which states that freedom of speech
on the Internet is as sacrosanct as freedom of speech in print or in
broadcast. (Most media outlets failed to report about this case.)

www.onlinejournal.com
Sub-titled “Building a New News Media By, Of and For the Public,”
Online Journal, established in 1998, features well-documented original
articles on matters of wide public concern.

"The Great Deception"
Part 5 of a multi-part series
Transcript of Mon.,Feb 18, 2002 Broadcast

"What Really Happened on Sept. 11th? "Part
5 (What Did George Bush Know and When Did he Know it?" popularly
known as “The Great Deception")

September 11th has brought mostly unpleasant changes, including curtailment
of civil liberties and threatened perpetual war. All rooted in the official
story of what happened on September 11th. Namely that one evil man and
his network are responsible. And that the U.S. military, intelligence
and political establishments were all caught totally off guard.
Millions of intelligent people accept this story as their own. “Any
argument about any aspect of the conduct of the war against terrorism,”
as Globe and Mail columnist John Ibbitson puts it, “must begin
with those airplanes smashing into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
And then it must stay there and never move from that spot.”
If it’s that important -- and I agree it is -- then it’s
the duty of the media and of intelligent citizens to inquire about any
anomalies about September 11th. Today’s question: what did George
Bush know and when did he know it on September 11th?
[VIDEO CLIP] David Halton on CBC-TV in a story on the first anniversary
of George Bush's taking office (Bush is seen sitting in a classroom
at Booker Elementary School in Sarasota, Florida and Andrew Card comes
to whisper in Bush's ear):
TRANSCRIPT: "Bush was first informed of the suicide attack at an
education event in Florida, his face creasing into anxiety. The crisis
transformed his presidency..."
This image, embedded in the official story, has led the world to believe
that when Bush’s chief of staff Andrew Card whispered into his
ear at an elementary school at 9:05 that morning, it was the first the
U.S. president learned that, in his words, America was under attack.
But a growing number of people including the careful researchers at
www.emperors-clothes.com don’t think so. Using verifiable publicly-available
information, Ilarion Bykov and Jared Israel, an intrepid Canadian, raise
questions mainstream media stubbornly refuse to even acknowledge.
Consider, Bykov and Israel say, the words of journalist John Cochrane,
who was travelling with the president on the morning of September 11th,
on an ABC Special Report. Cochrane is speaking to Peter Jennings:
"Peter, as you know, the president's down in Florida talking about
education. He got out of his hotel suite this morning, was about to
leave, reporters saw the White House chief of staff, Andy Card, whisper
into his ear. The reporter said to the president, 'Do you know what's
going on in New York?' He said he did, and he said he will have something
about it later. His first event is about half an hour at an elementary
school in Sarasota, Florida."
“So Bush knew,” writes emperors-clothes, “about the
first…incident before leaving his hotel.”
Take other evidence. By 8:20, according to its own official report,
the Federal Aviation Authority, the FAA, is fully aware of the unprecedented
emergency in the skies.
As Bycov and Israel point out, “The (president of the United States)…
travels with an entire staff…(including) the Secret Service, which
is responsible for his safety. The members of this support team have
the best communications equipment in the world. They maintain contact
with, or can easily reach, Bush’s cabinet, the national Military
Command Center in the Pentagon, the (FAA)…”
In other words, around 8:46 at the absolute latest the Secret Service
and the President would have known of all four hijacked airliners and
that one had hit the World Trade Center.
That’s two sets of proofs that question the famous whisper-in-the-ear
at 9:05. Still not convinced? How about the typically garbled words
of the President himself? From the transcript of a Town Hall session
in Orlando, Florida on December 4th:
JORDAN (a third grader): “…how did you feel when you heard
about the terrorist attack?” [applause]
THE PRESIDENT: “Thank you, Jordan. Well, Jordan…I was sitting
outside the classroom waiting to go in, and I saw an airplane hit the
tower -- the TV was obviously on. And I used to fly, myself, and I said,
well, there's one terrible pilot…. But I was whisked off there,
I didn't have much time to think about it. And I was sitting in the
classroom, and Andy Card, my Chief of Staff…walked in and said,
‘A second plane has hit the tower, America is under attack.’
And, Jordan, I wasn't sure what to think at first.”
Wait a minute! The president tells us he saw the incredible image of
the first plane going in. He went ahead with an easily-cancellable appointment.
Why? He tells us he knew his country was under attack, yet he continued
to listen to a student talk about her pet goat, and such, for another
25 minutes. Why?
Where can you find that Town Hall transcript? On the White House web
site. Thanks to a viewer on the West Coast for drawing it to my attention.
In other words, no matter how you cut it, George W. Bush is acting right
here. There are many other facts, equally puzzling. At least for anyone
still clinging to the official story of 9-11. His schedule and whereabouts
had been publicly announced. Why did the Secret Service not whisk him
away for safety’s sake?
Do you think there’s anything here that mainstream media should
follow up? Have you noticed any such follow-up? Do you find this as
incredible as I do? What will it take to snap people out of the hypnotic
trance of the official story and start asking questions? Maybe you calling
an editor and raising hell.
Until the world finds out the truth about what really happened on September
11th, the world is held hostage to the so-called war on terrorism. And
surely it’s time to recognize that for what it is: harsh final
steps to what the U.S. military terms “full spectrum dominance.”
Next week the final installment of “The Great Deception:”
Moral and spiritual challenges that arise amidst fear and denial in
a propagandized society.

Sources

WEBSITES

www.emperors-clothes.com
Follow the story headings

www.whitehouse.gov
Click “News and Policies,” then “December 2001,”
then scroll down (close to the end) to the part of transcript of the
Orlando, Florida town hall that I quote. You can also listen to the
U.S. president in streaming audio.

"The Great Deception"
Part 6 - Conclusion
Transcript of Mon.,Feb 25, 2002 Broadcast

"What Really Happened on Sept. 11th?"
Conclusion (What Did George Bush Know and When Did he Know it?" popularly
known as "The Great Deception")

Subject: Moral and spiritual challenges amidst fear and denial in
a propagandized society

The editors at the New York Times made the right judgment call, in
my opinion, by playing this story [“Pentagon Readies Efforts to
Sway Sentiment Abroad; Debate over Credibility; New Office Proposes
to Send News or Maybe False News to Even Friendly Lands,” by James
Dao and Eric Schmitt] at the top of their front page recently. Because
a campaign of government deception is a moral issue.
But in a way, these headlines are laughable, including as they do phrases
such as “…readies efforts…?” And “…proposes
to send…false news…?”
Are readers supposed to believe the Pentagon might… start lying?
Those who have seen the documentary The Panama Deception will find this
assumption impossible to swallow. [VIDEO CLIP from “The Panama
Deception,” Jeff Cohen of Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR)
of New York City, speaking]:
“The U.S. military said 250 civilians were killed. There isn’t
a single credible source in Panama that believes that’s true,
whether it’s ambulance drivers, human rights monitors, people
– doctors who worked in hospitals, neighbours of bombed-out blocks.
It’s just clearly false. That story would be so easy to tell for
any journalist worth his or her salt. But they’re not telling
it.”
Back to the Times article. The odd thing about it is that you can go
over it with a divining rod and find that neither the writers, nor anyone
they quote, makes so much as a passing reference to the simple wrongness
of government lying. Not once are the words “moral,” “morality,”
“ethics” or such, used, let alone “lies” or
“lying.”
In my moral book, publishing a story with morality at its heart, without
mentioning the word, is committing the sin of omission.
The story also accepts foolish statements about Saddam Hussein and prints
them with a straight face, as it were. It’s claimed he “…has
a charm offensive going on…’ ”
I don’t know about you, but I’ve noticed the offensive part
but not the charm part.
“ ‘…and we haven’t done anything to counteract
it,’ a senior military official said.”
Well, if you don’t count the U.S. government’s all-out propaganda
campaign against the Iraqi leader for more than a decade, then I guess
this guy’s got a point.
Readers are also misled to focus on side issues such as “public
perceptions,” “strategy,” “possible illegality”
and bureaucratic turf wars. This article – representing the crème
de la crème of U.S. journalism – symbolizes how disconnected
the U.S. media and government have become from moral questions, one
might almost say, from reality.
To give credit where credit’s due the Times ran an editorial terming
the Pentagon’s proposed new Office of Strategic Influence “Orwellian.”
Yet the editorial fails as well to question the fundamental justness
of the Pentagon.
Which brings me to my main point. The less people ask themselves questions
about deceit the more it clears the way for organizations such as the
CIA to continue to receive seemingly unending billions of dollars. Taxpayer
money used to train terrorists, as the CIA acknowledges it has. To destabilize
governments, as former CIA agent John Stockwell writes in his book In
Search of Enemies. And to inject toxic grey, white and black disinformation
into the world’s information systems, as William Blum spells out
in Killing Hope. All with barely a whisper of dissent.
“The lie,” wrote theologian Andre Dumas, “is biblically
portrayed as ‘the first and most poisonous source of injustice.’”
“Truth telling,” he wrote “is…absolutely essential
to the very life and health of the whole community.”
Which is at the heart of the Great Deception, about what really happened
on September 11th. For the past five weeks I’ve asked questions:
How could it be that no U.S. Air Force jet interceptors turned a wheel
on September 11th until it was too late? Is it coincidence that the
war on Afghanistan triggered by September 11th will clear the way for
petroleum pipelines of huge interest to the White House? How to explain
the virtual non reaction of President George Bush immediately following
the planes slamming into the World Trade Center?
These marked-up passages are from my dog-eared copy of a gem of a book,
The Idea of Disarmament, Rethinking the Unthinkable, by Alan Geyer.
Geyer, in 1982, writes: “The nuclear arms race has become this
generation’s severest test of truth. It is zealously promoted
with false words, deceptive jargon, pretentious dogmatics, hateful propaganda,
and arbitrary bars on access to the truth. “No realm of public
policy,” he continues, “is more corrupted by untruthful
speech than national security.”
Today the Big Lie of the so-called war on terrorism – itself firmly
based on the linchpin of the implausible official version of what happened
on September 11th -- is an even more severe test of truth, in my opinion.
Under the banner of the war on terrorism George W. Bush – with
the aid of the media -- zealously promotes perpetual global war in the
service of resource looting and permanent popularity for himself.
There’s unprecedented militarism. The USA is spending more than
half its budget on wars past, present and future, according to the Center
for Defense Information.
As Christian humanist Geyer writes in words truer today, in my view,
than when written: “Demythologizing has become the indispensable
theological tool of peacemaking: it is the operation empowering the
people of God to understand the stratagems by which inhuman speech violates
the Word of God. Those stratagems include a relentless outpouring of
myths about weapons, strategy, security, enemies, history, and human
nature – from government bureaucracies and adjunct think tanks
and co-opted media and electronic theologians.”
And in this gem of a book I find the perfect conclusion to this series
about what really happened on September the eleventh, about the Great
Deception, about moral and spiritual challenges amidst fear and denial.
In the 1930s there was a powerful peace movement. At that time a play
by Viennese poet Stefan Zweig was produced. The play’s principal
character, Jeremiah, bursts forth with these words:

"Peace is not a thing of weakness.
It calls for heroism and action.
Day by day you must wrest it from the mouths of liars.
You must stand alone against the multitude, for clamor is always on
the side of the many.
And the liar has ever the first word.
The meek must be strong."

The Panama Deception, 1992, by The Empowerment Project, in association
with Channel Four, London, and Rhino Home Video. Produced by Barbara
Trent, Joanne Doroshow, Nico Panigutti and David Kasper. One of the
best documentaries I’ve ever seen. Greatly relevent to our future.